If you think boring, dusty books and never-ending lectures when you think of history, now is a good time to change your viewpoint.
Because knowing a little about the history of affiliate marketing will mean the difference between struggling and getting no or few results and making smooth and consistent affiliate commissions.
This should not be boring anyway.
Maybe you thought affiliate marketing began after the internet marketing era.
No, it is a lot older. Locally, affiliate marketing took place when a vendor asked a customer, “Do you know anyone who would also profit from my offer? A friend? A neighbor? I will give you ten person of that person’s first purchase.”
Now, this was harder to keep track of both for the vendor and the customer.
This all became easier online because we had hyperlinks!
A hyperlink would take a visitor directly to the destination and it could contain a code that showed where it came from.
Amazon was among the first to see the advantages of such a system.
They created their Amazon Associates in 1996 and allowed everybody with a website to join for free.
Inside the Amazon Associates area, the new “associate” (now best known as affiliate) could create a link to Amazon products he wanted to promote. Then they would typically make ten percent of every purchase made through their link.
Affiliate marketing started to spread worldwide at this point in time.
Everything was different.
It was easy to become one of Amazon’s affiliates. They did not have any demands as to make X number of sales in the first X days like they have now.
Only a few people had homepages.
You could not just make a couple of clicks and have a blog up and running. You had to learn HTML code to create every page online. If you wanted them to look nice, you also had to learn CSS code.
Creating an affiliate page took many hours.
This meant very little competition. So, for the few affiliates with the technical skills, life was easy back then. Especially, because SEO…
Well, SEO did not really exist either.
You just wrote what you wanted to write and naturally put in words that got your page found. The biggest search engine that did not rely on five keywords provided by the site owner was AltaVista. Then Google came and revolutionized the search engine world with its simplicity.
There was no need for tricks back then.
Your page would show up in search engines because there were not that many of them. And if it did not appear naturally, you could share the link to the search engine, and it would index it.
With the first CMSs (Content Management System) creating a website suddenly got a lot easier.
Things began to go truly fast, once WordPress created their two-step set-up blog. Amazing. Now everyone could create a web presence.
And they did.
And all this getting easier and easier made some affiliates lazy. And dishonest. Over time, consumers found out and started to distrust those affiliates.
In fact, all affiliates lost trust.
It was not just the crooked affiliates who were too lazy to go through a product and review it.
It was not just the corrupted ones who painted flawless pictures of faulty products.
It was everyone who wrote and shared a review online.
Suddenly the word “affiliate” became synonymous with untrustworthy. You began to see people excusing themselves for leaving links with the words, “This is not an affiliate link,” because if it was, it automatically meant that this person was lying.
Being an affiliate became such a dirty profession that some autoresponders like MailChimp and Elastic Email forbid it. They ban accounts for doing any kind of affiliate promotions, honest or not.
At first, this seems like bad news for new affiliates.
It is, actually, the opposite. A little adversity creates a roadblock. Winners will either find a way around it or burst through it. Losers will give up.
Believe in yourself and you can use those crooked affiliates as your lever.
Thanks to them, you get the opportunity to rise high and make a lot affiliate marketing commissions. Plus, your audience will thank you.
Just for being you.
Do you want to know how you can obtain all that, starting today?
Here are the steps to a successful affiliate marketing business where you will thrive, while the lazy and corrupt affiliates will fail.
Just rinse and repeat this process with more problems and more solutions, preferably to the same audience.
Over time, sooner than you think, they will notice that you are different from other affiliates. You give them your honest opinion. You go through the products before you promote them. You know what you are talking about.
They come to know, like and trust you and now your affiliate business can go far.
When the world is full of crooks, you can easily build trust just by being you and being honest.
